Food for Thought

When you love food as much as we do, you think about it a lot.  Here’s what’s on our minds lately:

  • We get a lot of inspiration from cooking shows.  We recently saw Giada make sweet potato tots with “dill dust,” and plan to try her recipe.  We like sweet potatoes, but we’ve never successfully cooked them in a really delicious way at home.  (Has anyone else?  If so, please share!)  Sweet potatoes in tot form might be just the ticket.  Giada fries them, which isn’t the most healthy preparation, so maybe we’ll do some research on baking or roasting them instead.

Me so cold

  • In other cooking inspiration from the TV, an episode of the show “Unique Eats” featured brussels sprouts cooked with bacon and a miso glaze.  The recipe looks pretty good, if a bit time-intensive (the miso sauce cooks for 2 hours!), and we’d prefer not to fry the brussels sprouts.  So maybe we’ll adapt it by cooking the sprouts in a skillet with pancetta like this, then finish them with a drizzle of the miso glaze from here.  Thinking about miso reminds me that we need to work out the kinks of our adaptation of this recipe for miso-glazed pork chops and post it here.  Anybody have any other good miso recipes?  Even though a tub of the stuff lasts forever in the fridge, we feel like we won’t ever end up using it all and would like to cook with it more often.
  • Not all our food ideas come from television (surprising, considering how much TV we watch.)  Dan read somewhere once that you can improve the quality of store-bought chicken stock by simmering it with a couple tablespoons of white wine for 15-20 minutes before you use it.  We tried this trick recently with risotto, since the chicken stock had to be heated anyway before adding it to the rice.  Without doing a blind taste test, we couldn’t say for sure that the wine tip made the difference, but it was one of the best risottos we’ve ever made at home.  We’re suckers for easy kitchen secrets that make food and cooking better, and we’d love to hear yours if you’ve got any!

3 thoughts on “Food for Thought

  1. I like Southwestern Spiced Sweet Potato Fries With Chili-Cilantro Sour Cream in New York Times article “Home Cooks Rethink Sweet Potatoes” from November 15, 2011

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